![]() She smiled widely and pointed to her hoodie as she told the governor that her son attended college in his home state. Suzy Barker, a native Iowan dressed in an orange-and-blue University of Florida hoodie, waited in a crowd of fellow Republicans on Friday morning to meet Gov. The headline, "A Glimpse of DeSantis in Iowa: Awkward, but Still Winning the Crowd," is a perfect fit for the story and its tale of the big city fancy school-educated Floridian trying to connect with the commoners in Trumplandia and other parts of "real America": In a mostly flattering and humanizing profile, the Times emphasized DeSantis and his personality and the political horse race instead of the man's values and policies and how they will hurt American people en masse if he becomes president. In a recent story that is representative of a larger pattern among the country's leading media outlets, the New York Times profiled DeSantis and his attempts to connect with the Republican Party's base voters. Ultimately, there are few if any substantive differences between Trump and DeSantis except in how their fascism and other antidemocracy beliefs and policies are packaged and presented.įlorida is officially a laboratory for fascism in the U.S. For institutions like the news media, bad habits die again and again and again ad infinitum until the lesson is learned too late.Īs I explained in a previous essay here at Salon, DeSantis is no friend of democracy he is a friendly fascist who is in many ways more dangerous than Trump. Instead of foregrounding those facts in their coverage of DeSantis and his imminent 2024 presidential run, the mainstream news media is consistently describing him with euphemisms and other complementary language designed to make him sound exciting and compelling: "Rockstar." "Culture warrior." "Brawler."Īs the truism observes, bad habits die hard. Through his policies, speech, and other actions, DeSantis has proven himself to be a neofascist and an authoritarian who treats real democracy and pluralism with contempt. ![]() 7 years later, the mainstream news media is repeating that pattern of behavior with Florida Gov. Trump, empowered by the news media's normalization of him, would then lead the greatest political crime spree in American history. After he won the 2016 election, the mainstream news media continued to insist, years into the disaster, that Trump at some point "would rise to the occasion" and make a "presidential" pivot. As Trump's fascist and demagogic tendencies (and plan) became even more obvious, the mainstream news media largely continued to treat him as a normal political candidate who in the end would be constrained by the country's democratic institutions and norms. He would show himself to be a pathological liar but the news media waited several years to state that obvious fact. Donald Trump was initially treated by the media as a largely harmless curiosity, then a compelling and fascinating public figure who was viewed as an "insurgent" and "unconventional." That is when the media began to normalize Trump.
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